newYou can now listen to Fox News articles.
Like all beagles, Iceman has an amazing sense of smell. His nose is very powerful and is used to sniff out cancer. Using beagles’ excellent sense of smell, health startup Spotitearly has developed a test to help people get pre-screened for cancer as a way to increase the chances of early detection. “Only 14% of newly diagnosed cancers in the U.S. are screened regularly, so not many people actually get tested on time,” says CEO Shlomi Madar.
The test is easy, Madar said. “All we ask the patient to do is wear a mask for a few minutes, take a breath, put it in a capsule and send it back to the lab.” Once the sample is back in the lab, the beagle begins looking for the four most common types of cancer: breast cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, and lung cancer. In Spotitearly’s first clinical trial, dogs detected cancer with 94% accuracy, they reported. “We pride ourselves on being able to catch cancer as early as stage 1. If we catch cancer early enough, we can actually increase survival rates to 99%,” he says.
The puppies were chosen for the job because their sense of smell is 100,000 times more sensitive than humans, allowing them to sniff out the equivalent of half a teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The lab combines the power of puppies with artificial intelligence to detect cancer in breath samples. Madar explains, “We’re monitoring the dog’s behavior and physiological signals, so we’re looking at things like the dog’s heart rate and acceleration. And all that huge amount of information is fed into machine learning algorithms, so it actually improves over time.”
Each beagle must already be trained as a detection dog. They then go through a rigorous training process specifically aimed at identifying specific types of cancer. “We take full advantage of redundancy, which means every sample is sniffed multiple times by the entire herd, rather than by one dog,” points out Madar.
Your health care professional will provide you with your results within a few days and will recommend next steps if your test is positive. Madar points out that the test is not a replacement for a doctor’s visit. You can also pre-order a test kit, which is still in clinical research in the United States but is expected to be commercially available next year.
Madar said Spotitearly could detect many more types of cancer as long as new swarms are trained to sniff them out. He added that dogs that do not pass training will be donated to special needs families.
